It’s The Chairs, Stupid!

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Looks like I might lose the bet I made in last night’s post after all. Apparently, the parties are arguing about chairs now. As Nikki Finke reports, reps from the WGA, the studios and networks argued over chairs at last Friday’s meeting. Nikki wrote “It’s all so shamelessly reminiscent of the impasse between the White House and Hanoi at the Paris Peace Talks back in 1968 when the two sides argued for a month over the size and shape of the table they would sit at once formal negotiations began.”

The Guild apparently didn’t have enough seats for the Studio/Net side at Friday’s negotiations. A WGA rep wouldn’t let the Studio/Net reps “sit down, or bring chairs in from other rooms, or even go downstairs to a bigger conference room that had seating for everyone. For awhile there was an impasse, and then a Paramount labor exec stepped into the fray and started yelling at guild members, ‘What are you trying to prove here?’ Finally, several negotiating committee members, the best known of whom was Desperate Housewives hyphenate Marc Cherry, went out and fetched chairs for the extra AMPTP’ers. ‘It was getting THAT uncomfortable that Marc Cherry got off his ass and went chair hunting. Says a lot,’ one WGA wag opined.”

Let’s just hope this week’s negotiations aren’t dominated by the decor.